Archive for the ‘Biodefense’ Category

Edward Lucas Mr. Lucas is a senior editor at the Economist and the author of “The Snowden Operation,” a Kindle Single available on Amazon

Jan. 29, 2014

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: The Snowden story is full of puzzles and suspicious twists and turns. Snowdenistas are extraordinarily paranoid about the actions of their own governments, yet they and their media allies are strangely trusting about the aims and capabilities of the government of Russia—where Mr. Snowden arrived so oddly and lives so secretly.

He and his allies are not conscious Russian agents. But history gives plenty of examples of indirect Kremlin involvement in Western political movements. Like the antinuclear movement of the early 1980s, Snowdenistas see their own countries’ flaws with blinding clarity and ignore those of repressive regimes elsewhere.

Far too little attention has been paid to the political agendas of people such as the bombastic Brazil-based blogger Glenn Greenwald, the hysterical hacktivist Jacob Appelbaum and the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who cloak their extreme and muddled beliefs in the language of rights, liberties and justice. Their actions are bringing about the greatest peacetime defeat in the history of the West. That is not a noble crusade

Most of my media colleagues seem to think Edward Snowden is a saint and proto-martyr. Their Hollywood-style story line is that the fugitive National Security Agency contractor has bravely exposed American spy agencies’ tricks and mischief. But the theft and publication of secret documents is not a heroic campaign. At best it is reckless self-indulgence, and at worst sabotage and treason.

Mr. Snowden has not proved systematic abuse by the NSA or partner agencies. Moreover, his story has been told naïvely and hysterically, with a huge dose of hypocrisy and with gravely destructive effect.

Espionage is inherently disreputable: It involves stealing secrets. But enemies of the West—notably Russia and China—are spying on us. Our agencies defend us from them—and help catch terrorists and gangsters, too. But the media’s sensationalist and misleading interpretation of the stolen documents has weakened security relationships among Western allies; it has corroded public trust; it has undermined the West’s standing in the eyes of the rest of the world; and it has paralyzed our intelligence agencies.

Mr. Snowden’s allies—the Snowdenistas, as I term them—lack the skills to keep the material safe, or redact it to limit the damage. Their claims to the contrary are not credible. Moreover, they seem oblivious to the idea that we in the West have enemies and competitors. Yet if we suffer, they gain.

AFP/Getty Images

Anti-Americanism in Germany and other European countries is now ablaze. The Russian-Chinese campaign to wrest control of the Internet from its American founding fathers (meaning more censorship and control) has gained momentum. Western protestations of concern for online freedom and privacy ring hollow. The reputation of the biggest Western Internet firms has taken a pounding for their supposed complicity in espionage. Their rivals are gleeful. (more…)

BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of ‘germ’

warfare raises fear in the Mideast

Iran, Syria and North Korea step up work on biological weapons

By Jill Bellamy van Aalst and Clare Lopez and Reza Kahlili

Jill Bellamy van Aalst is a biological warfare threat analyst. Clare Lopez is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy. Reza Kahlili, author of “A Time to Betray” (Threshold, 2010), is a former CIA operative and serves on the Task Force on National and Homeland Security.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Illustration by Greg Groesch for The Washington Times

The sectarian war in Syria reportedly has claimed more than 60,000 lives and spawned concerns in the Middle East and the West about access to chemical weapons by non-state actors such as al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles are of immediate concern to Israel, Jordan and the United States, whether in Syrian President Bashar Assad’s hands or those of terrorist organizations. Yet the locations of chemical weapons munitions and Scud missiles equipped with chemical warheads in Syria have been identified and are continually monitored. That is not the case with the arguably more dangerous biological weapons being developed by the nexus of Iran, Syria and North Korea.

More than 167 nations have signed the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention. Syria is a signatory but has not ratified the treaty. Iran, also a signatory, has ratified it, but is pursuing development of microbial agents with the aid of Russian and North Korean scientists who may be graduates of the Soviet-era Biopreparat program that created some of these dangerous biological agents.

Gingrich’s Worthy Brain Pulse

An electromagnetic pulse attack is not a fanciful notion.

Newt Gingrich’s rise in the polls has brought attention to his various “big ideas,” and plenty of derision from other GOP Presidential hopefuls and the media. Among the most undeserved targets is the former Speaker’s concern about an electromagnetic pulse (or EMP) attack.

In speeches and articles over many years, Mr. Gingrich has sounded the alarm about this vulnerability. A single nuclear explosion high in the Earth’s atmosphere would create an electromagnetic pulse that could do enormous harm by destroying electronic circuits on the ground. “Such an event would destroy our complex, delicate high tech digital society in an instant and throw all our lives back to an existence equal to that of the Middle Ages,” he wrote in an introduction to “One Second After,” a 2009 science-fiction novel by William Forstchen. He has returned to this theme during the campaign.

The usual media suspects have recently run skeptical stories on his “doomsday vision” and “silly science.” They claim that terrorists aren’t close to getting a nuclear weapon and that no country would dare try an EMP attack. But then few imagined a terror attack using airplanes against the twin towers or anthrax in letters.

A single nuclear weapon detonated above the U.S. might not kill anyone immediately. But in the worst case millions could subsequently die from a lack of modern medical care or possibly food, since farmers couldn’t harvest crops nor distributors get food to market. Access to drinking water could be cut if many of America’s dams, reservoirs and water-treatment facilities were shut down. The U.S. would also then be more exposed to a secondary attack by conventional weapons.

These scenarios aren’t Mr. Gingrich’s inventions. They come from a commission created by Congress in 2000. In a 2008 report, the commission called EMP “one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences.”

Mr. Gingrich deserves credit for bringing EMP to public attention. The commission recommended better intelligence, especially in coastal waters from which a Scud missile with a nuke could be launched, robust missile defenses, and hardened protection for the civilian electrical power grid. Denial of EMP, or scorn for the messenger, offers no protection

‘Contagion’ all too real

Film exposes true biodefense vulnerabilities that need solutions

By Tevi Troy Tevi Troy, a former deputy secretary of health and human services, is a fellow at the Hudson Institute and at the Homeland Security Policy Institute. –

The Washington Times

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Jude Law’s character, Alan Krumwiede, wanders through an abandoned street as a horrific disease ravages the world in “Contagion.” (Warner Bros. Pictures)

“Contagion” was the No. 1 box-office movie on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 – and with good reason. The New York Post’s Lou Lumenick called the Steven Soderbergh-directed thriller about a killer virus “easily the scariest of the disaster films” since Sept. 11, and the film keeps viewers squirming and in suspense until the revealing and harrowing final shot.

One of the reasons the movie is so frightening is that it is so realistic, and verisimilitude clearly is something the filmmakers were striving to attain. The film thanks the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Defense for their assistance, suggesting that those entities did not have significant disagreements with the way the film portrayed the government’s earnest but not always effective response to the film’s fictional MEV virus. Nor should they. For the most part, the film shows U.S. officials to be smart, hardworking, dedicated and self-sacrificing, and the government plays a key role in the creation of an anti-MEV vaccine that helps humanity fight back against the deadly viral threat.

Based on my experience with U.S. biopreparedness efforts, the U.S. government’s role is depicted fairly accurately in the film. At the same time, even though the government comes off pretty well in “Contagion,” the scariest part of the film is the vulnerabilities the film highlights in our current system. Despite spending $60 billion in biodefense efforts since the 2001 anthrax attacks, we still are not fully prepared for a full-on bioevent, whether it be made by man or by nature. The film identifies at least four biopreparedness weaknesses, all of which could be addressed by smart government planning: (more…)